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Creating Multi-Level Skill Hierarchies in Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2024-01-18 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

What is a useful skill hierarchy for an autonomous agent? We propose an answer based on a graphical representation of how the interaction between an agent and its environment may unfold. Our approach uses modularity maximisation as a central organising principle to expose the structure of the interaction graph at multiple levels of abstraction. The result is a collection of skills that operate at varying time scales, organised into a hierarchy, where skills that operate over longer time scales are composed of skills that operate over shorter time scales. The entire skill hierarchy is generated automatically, with no human intervention, including the skills themselves (their behaviour, when they can be called, and when they terminate) as well as the hierarchical dependency structure between them. In a wide range of environments, this approach generates skill hierarchies that are intuitively appealing and that considerably improve the learning performance of the agent.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.09980,
  title  = {Creating Multi-Level Skill Hierarchies in Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Joshua B. Evans and Özgür Şimşek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.09980},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

20 pages, 10 figures. Accepted at NeurIPS 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T11:07:24.739Z